Wagner James Au reports on virtual worlds, VR & Internet culture

Thursday, January 31, 2019

This utterly gorgeous image of British singer Sade was created by Nettrice Gaskins, an African-American artist whose work explores "techno-vernacular creativity" and Afrofuturism. As that suggests, her medium for creating this image and others in her series of portraits is unique: Deep Dream, the neural network AI.

“I used Deep Dream Generator's algorithm, which is inspired by the human brain," she tells me. "The generator uses the stylistic elements of one image to draw the content of another. The first picture defines the portrait I want to create and the second picture I upload gives the program a style to simulate. The process may include more than one pass in the generator, using different style images, until I get the image I want." This portrait of Sade, for instance, "[Is] a composite of multiple Deep Dream images."

Dreams, a PS4-only game from Media Molecule, creator of the user-generated content-centric hit Little Big Planet, has just lifted the beta tester NDA on this new game, "a space where you go to play and experience the dreams of Media Molecule and our community. It’s also a space in which to create your own dreams, whether they’re games, art, films, music or anything in-between and beyond."

This is an excellent Twitter thread on 2019 AR/VR/AI trends from mixed reality thought leader* Jesse Damiani. I agree with him that immersive theater and art installations incorporating VR will enjoy a fairly strong wave of interest, because art patrons tend to have greater patience for new/novel experiences, and are a smaller audience that's easier to on-ramp. (As anyone who's tried out a VR demo in a gallery, the set-up time is inevitably irksome and time consuming.)

I'm more skeptical VR/AR physical installations for a mass market will gain traction, notwithstanding the huge VR investment in Sandbox VR -- again, the basic friction of setting up thousands of people to experience VR a day will likely kill the novelty factor quick, especially for a price point of $20-40. (And once again, even in Los Angeles, name brand IMAX couldn't attract an audience to its VR experiences that was larger than the audience for a single small movie theater.)

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Acadicus is a new multi-user VR platform that's lead developed by Jon Brouchoud, who's been creating award-winning virtual world-based projects for real world work for well over a decade. Acadicus has already won last year's best in show award from the International Meeting for Simulation in Healthcare, and as that suggests, medical training is one its top use cases -- honed by a doctor his team worked closely with:

"Our goal with Acadicus is to provide a VR Sim Lab where we're not providing any instruction," Jon tells me, "but are instead giving medical schools and experts the ability to create their own simulation environments. We're drawing heavily on our architectural and virtual worlds experience to focus on building this platform, and collaborate with Dr. Eric B. Bauman who serves as our medical subject matter expert. He also brings experience with virtual worlds and game based learning, so it's been a very powerful partnership. Dr. Bauman has also been our client on several healthcare and medical VR simulations as well."

Watch the trailer video below. Unlike most other VR training platforms, Acadicus is very much a multiuser experience, a feature which Jon says has excited medical professionals:

Info is continuously coming out about the event as we speak, but here’s what we know so far. The event will begin at 2 PM ET on Saturday, though it’s not clear how long it will run for. It takes place in Pleasant Park, though you may see the lights/hear the music from anywhere on the map... There’s apparently a cosmetic bundle for the event which will include a Marshmello skin, pickaxe and spray. No word on pricing. There are some leaked animations that show “DJ dancing” for lack of a better term which would appear to be how Marshmello himself will act on stage.

Since Fortnite Battle Royale is run on thousands of separate servers, it's debatable how "live" Marshmello is actually going to be, beyond the lucky 100 (or so) players who get to be in his actual server. The chatter in Reddit's Fortnite board strongly suggests his music files are already embedded in the game client; if that's right, there may be hundreds or even thousands of automated copies of Marshmello's performing avatars synced to canned audio files of his show, to serve such a huge audience. (Fortnite peak user concurrency is a seriously insane 8 million+.)

Hat tip Forbe's Paul Tassi, who says this "has the potential to be a very cool, very unique moment in gaming, a live concert embedded in a game where millions attend in real-time." Millions of audience members are unique, and it's definitely cool, but far as real-time concerts by real world music stars in online games, we need to go back to ancient times (by which I mean 2006) and Suzanne Vega in Second Life:

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

"This is from a game called Gris that appeals to me though I am not on Steam so I have not played it. I watched a walkthrough that is exquisitely beautiful on YouTube [see below] and I can imagine this game could be addictive. Imagine playing a game in an ever-changing watercolor world.

"I like this screenshot posted by Kimmy Ridley with a quote from Anne Roiphe for a title: 'Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.' The duotone from pink to blue which seems to encompass the idea of there being two parts to grief; the picture seems blown out by light, though that was probably done with a gradient overlay of white to transparent, not with lighting effects."

Sandbox VR provides a virtual-reality experience — you and your friends gear up, donning some of the latest VR headsets and high-tech computer backpacks, and are dropped into a virtual world, whether it's a pirate ship, a zombie invasion, or a vision of what Hong Kong could look like in 2088. It costs about $40 per person for an hourlong experience, which you book online. Sandbox VR plans to use its Series A to expand to new locations and create different experiences — games — for people to play at Sandbox locations...

Part of how Sandbox VR markets itself is through social media. Participants get video of themselves all rigged up and can share clips of themselves as the characters inside the game. "Seeing it on Instagram is going to be one of the really killer secrets of this business," said Andrew Chen, an Andreessen Horowitz partner. "When you are having such a good time, and it creates a video of you and all your friends screaming and ducking and like all this happening, and it's so fun, that's this leap that so many people share."

I can see this working! Then again (as I'm sure Sandbox VR and Andreesen Horowitz also know), VR-driven content can only remain popular on Instagram with constantly refreshed and updated content (lest people get bored with it), and Snapchat's augmented reality features which enable sharing virtualized experiences with friends haven't exactly helped the app maintain momentum. And far as location-based VR go, name brand IMAX couldn't attract an audience to its VR experiences that was larger than the audience for a single small movie theater.

All that to one side, here's hoping Sandbox VR created a winning alchemy . Watch the trailer below:

Monday, January 28, 2019

New stats of social VR usage on Steam (via SteamDB): In the last few weeks, VRChat (by far the market leader) has seen a substantial growth spurt in peak concurrency rates. After a giant spike of usage during its Ugandan Knuckles-flavored viral video peak in December 2017/January 2018, peak concurrency rates fell to around 6000-8000 from June to October. Since then, however, VRChat has been steadily picking its usage rates, and last month, saw a substantial jump, peaking at just under 11,000 on New Year's Day. (Lots of virtual parties to celebrate the New Year, looks like.) It's pretty typical for gaming to peak during in the holidays, but VRChat has sustained that momentum into the rest of January, peaking over 10,000 in concurrency every week.

10,000 is quite a lot. As a point of contrast, last generation's virtual world leader, Second Life, still gets peek concurrencies between 41,000-53,000 (this month) from a monthly active user base of about 600,000. So it's likely that VRChat has monthly active users in the low six figures -- between 100,000-250,000 is a safe estimate, a thriving community. (As for why it is thriving, Kermit the Frog may have a clue.)

By contrast, the two official, VR-centric heirs to Second Life are not doing anywhere near as well on Steam: